[How To] Shut Down And Restart Your PC Easily In Windows 8

Windows 8 is a genuinely good OS, bringing in some really nice improvements for the desktop users in terms of speed and performance. But it surely has taken a lot of steps back in terms of intuitiveness in performing even mundane actions like Shutdown or Restart. Here is a quick way to do that by using desktop shortcuts.

While the earlier versions of Windows just involved a simple Start –> Shutdown affair to shut down the PC, Windows 8 requires you to invoke the charms bar by first hovering your mouse to the left or pressing Ctrl + C , then selecting settings, then selecting power, then selecting shutdown. This definitely frustrates a normal PC user and may be even intimidating for people who have no prior experience with Windows 8.

A Simple Solution : Create Shortcuts on the Desktop

While this may sound lame, sadly for Windows 8, this approach is actually faster than doing all the go-to-charms and click here there circus just to shut down your PC.

To create a new shortcut, Right-Click anywhere in the Desktop and in the context menu select New > Shortcut option.

You will be greeted by the Create Shortcut wizard.

In the location field enter the following command

shutdown /s /t 0

Then proceed to enter the name of the shortcut. You can also change the icon of the shortcut easily to something like this.

Congratulations on creating your shortcut!

You can also pin the shortcut to the start menu, by right clicking on the shortcut and selecting pin to start option

Wait….what did I just type?

In short you just ran the shutdown.exe file with some parameters. Here is some simple explanation.

In shutdown /s /t 0 /s stands for shutdown option and /t stands for time in seconds after which the machine will shutdown. In this case we have specified it as 0. If you don’t specify /t then Windows will shutdown after 30 seconds. You can specify /t from anywhere between 0 to 315360000 (which is 10 years, thank me later ).

You can also specify /r instead of /s parameter which will effectively restart your PC instead of shutting down. So for restarting the system immediately you can run shutdown /r /t 0.

Let me warn you by telling that one you double click on these shortcuts, there are no confirmation dialogue boxes so your PC will just shutdown or restart without asking you why would you did that to her.